Scalix Forums

I am trying to restore deleted e-mails for on of the users. I am running Scalix 11.4.6 on RHEL5.x. Last week, the user deleted some e-mails from last summer .

I have run the following command to update the Item Structure Server database to the beggining of this year.


# omupdtis -r -f 01.01.10 -F 12:0:0 -d0
From 01.01.10 at 12:00:00
To 08.08.10 at 18:28:17
Processing log records ...


Total log files read: 2
Total log records read: 13069
Total log records added: 13068
#


I then try to get a list of files that need to be recovered from tape. Backups are done by creating a Linux logical volume (LVM) snapshot of the /var/opt/scalix directory and backing the scalix directory to tape.

# omprepsur -n "John Smith" -t 01.01.10 -T 12:0:0 -d /export/restore -f /export/restore/restorelist1 -i 0
The user name / number provided did not exist at the time specified.
#

This happens with some user names but not others. It never works if I specify "-G the_user's_globally_unique_id" even if it worked for that user when the name was specified.

We initially were running Scalix 10. We upgrading to Scalix 11 at least a year ago. The upgrade involved copying the /var/opt/scalix directory from the Scalix 10 server to new machine (with new host name) and installing Scalix 11. The mailnode name of the old server was preserved. I suspect that problem accounts are those that were created after Scalix 11 upgrade. Or maybe created after I last tried using omstore. Including the mailnode name with omprepsur doesn't help.

Alternately, I would copy the user file system folder specified with "omshow -n username -f" into a "restore" user's directory. However, omshowu however that only lists one directory. Most users will have multiple file system folders so that approach won't work.


Any ideas?
Thanks

Maybe I am leading you in the wrong direction but ... why do you need to recover from backups ? If you have not changed the retention policy of deleted items and if you have not ran any omtidyu command then the items deleted by the user are kept in the Scalix's recovery folder (which is hidden to the user by default): you could simply enable the visibility of the recovery folder to the user (using SAC), let the user find and recover the deleted items and eventually re-hide the recovery folder.

The user notified me about the deletions about 1 week after he deleted the items. So that would rule out the recovery folder (assuming the 7 day default.) Additionally, I would like to make sure that recovery from tape backups does work in case of mailbox corruption, accidentally deleted user, or recovery of e-mail that someone doesn't realize they lost until months later. End-users sometimes enable autoarchiving to PST files in MS OUtlook without realizing that that mail will not be backed up.

I prefer not to use the SUR tools if I can possibly avoid it. Normally I would restore the entire mailstore (or at least /var/opt/scalix/??/s) on a different machine, then use sxmboxexp to get the individual emails extracted. Alternatively, I try and recover such from the Archive (if enabled).

I am not familiar with the archive option - I probably should be.

Pulling the entire mailstore from tape then copying it over to a 2ndary machine took several hours. I need to do a full backup of /var/opt/scalix in case the primary server dies. However, it was a slow way to restore a handful of messages. Of course this shouldn't have been necessary if the user had reported issue and I had displayed his recovery folder with in one week.

I don't want to have to so smboxexp for each user for each nightly backup- that is probably not feasible in terms of disk space, tape space and time.

FYI- When I do a restore with smboximp, I can specify the folder I want to restore but I can't specify the restore destination.

--target "Restore" option will create a folder called Restore but the e-mail is not restored to it. I also tried
--target F-0006097714
and
--target 0006097714

Same prob, Just safer to create a secondary account for the restore, and have the user configure an additional IMAP account to that to pull his mail back. (Or have him configure an IMAP account for the restore server.)